


Morning Light

by amb-roses (buckshot_lariat)



Series: One Hundred Ways to Say 'I Love You' [7]
Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: 100 Ways to Say I Love You Writing Challenge, Domestic Fluff, Drabble, Early Mornings, Established Relationship, Fluff, Injury Recovery, Introspection, Light Angst, M/M, Morning Routines, POV Second Person, ask to tag, kind of, morning morning, soft and gay is what it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 23:53:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17375570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckshot_lariat/pseuds/amb-roses
Summary: 6.) "Have a good day at work."Finn cherishes every evening he tucks into bed with Seth there, arms open and waiting. He wouldn’t give those moments for the whole damn world. Anyone who knew of them knew that. Something even more precious, though, something he kept between himself and Seth, was the mornings.





	Morning Light

**Author's Note:**

> impulse control? dont know her  
> title from morning light by wilderado  
> cross posted from the main fic (first work in the series)

Some of your fondest memories of him come in the form of his tired self.

Many nights were spent up, listen to music in the dark or watching cheesy movies and infomercials early into the morning as the travel schedules haunted you into your injury-downtime. He would insist that he stay up with you despite shipping out early the next days, claiming it wouldn’t be right knowing you were staying up alone, struggling to sleep with a wacky internal clock or the pain of your shoulder, the ache of injury and recovery. The way recovery felt like the tide, making progress and losing it, making some more and then getting it pushed back farther. Every over-eager pull of your shoulder pushing the date farther and farther from your reach, casting you ever farther into the shadows. Driving you slowly insane, he said.

Sometimes you couldn’t sleep because you couldn’t stop thinking. Sometimes you couldn’t sleep because of the irrational guilt that settles in twitchy fingers and headaches behind your eyes.

He helped.

He pressed close, contained your jitters between the arm of the couch, the couch cushion behind you, and his embrace. He tangled fingers together to still your own, covered you with a blanket to contain the heat that escaped, rattled on for hours about dogs and licorice red titles, that music store down the street that he wants to splurge some extra cash on next time you both go out. Some coffee shop Cesaro recommended a town over, a new move he wants to try out next time he’s got practice with a ring and some training pads. Went on and on with a knowing gleam in his eye, spoke over the voices that rattled in the back of your mind. Put emotion in, gestured wildly to the flat whispers in your ears that spat frozen words and lifeless fact.

He ran fingers soothingly through your hair, starting small braids in short hair and initiating a favorite past time of yours. A few long, thin braids and the rest in the ponytail of his hair. One thick fishtail down his back or over a shoulder. Three partial braids into a ponytail. Small, complicated braids snuck in under layers of fluff, hidden just for you and him, away from prying eyes. Just curling your fingers in the soft feeling of hair without the texture of oils and wet ringlets that his hair sprung into at the ends.

Sometimes, he held you close and whispered of dreams and imaginary worlds, something for both of you, of your enemies vanquished, of gold and hard-won, deservingly-earned victories and the days you had coming, of light and dark and both of you together in the end.

You take these with you into a shared dream on your tiny little couch or get him coherent enough to stumble to bed. You set things up for the next morning along the way, throwing a blanket over him and tucking it around him like you remember your mother doing for you to wrap it all up, and startling hard when a hand darts out to snatch your wrist up. He blinks blearily at you, whispering your name like he’s tasting it for the first time, a smile teasing at the corners of his mouth like he can’t believe it.

You tell him to rest, to sleep, that you’ll be there to greet him in the morning.

He protests, voice thick, and repeats your name again with a pitiful whine that you, for some reason, find incredibly endearing more than obnoxious like everyone else does.

You stare at him, think of every nightmare and terror that spat him out every night on the road before you had started sleeping with him. You remember every gulping gasp, every rattle of his chest and every wet eyed look when he thought everyone was asleep. Every face pressed into the crook of his arm, every muffled sob and tear-tracked face, every single fitful nap after that, and your heart aches for this man you’d never thought you could love so dearly, so wholly, so completely.  

Such strong affection consumes you right there, in your faithfully aged sweat pants and too-big shirt of string and faded Japanese decals, in your uncombed hair and sleeplessness, in just-Finn. Just-Finn, who likes Legos and art, who likes Hallmark movies and extra spice in his sugar, Just-Finn who misses Japan, who grew up in a small little town with the biggest, most impossible dreams imaginable and made it. Just-Finn, who’s helplessly and hopelessly infatuated with a passionate Architect, who loves you back with just as much fervor. Who loves you back with that same, matched level of intimacy and tenderness.

Such strong affection consumes you on the spot and you have no idea how you’ve gotten there, how you’ve lived such a life on your own. How you’ve made it here and into his home, into his returned devotion, into his life and into your own home, with him. Into his arms as he holds the blanket open for you and whispers your name once more, this time in smug joy, familiar warmth. A certain kind of welcome.

He must read some part of your thoughts on your face because he peppers a few feather-light kisses, shivers when your noses meet in an Eskimo kiss, as your cold toes brush his legs, tangling your limbs together. You’re both like two pieces of a puzzle, the way you each move knowingly into place for ultimate comfort and warmth against the chill that follows you into bed. Your arm under his head, at his shoulder to curl around him, your other over lower chest to cup his back. His own under your arm snugly to gently hold the back of your head, the other under the curve of your side to press firmly at your lower back, pulling you closer to press another kiss like a promise to your forehead.

Even as he begins to snore and snuffle into your hair, as night becomes twilight and then dawn and the world brightens, you stay up and keep watch. You’re proud to admit you fended off each demon that came for your lover in the night. Each one slayed mercilessly under your weary, steadfast gaze, your protective embrace, your pure will. Even with your injury barring you from the ring, you fight for the both of you through the night and into the day.

You recall a time when he had bashfully, under his breath and not meant for your ears, called you his sun. A flush had risen to your cheeks and ears, and you both went about pretending you hadn’t heard. Now, farther into your relationship, ebbed and flowed and aged by time and experience, you cherish it. If you are to be his beloved sun, burning all who stand against you and bringing warm and light, then he must be your sunflower. He certainly acts like one, attention locked to you, chasing you across every room, staring and soaking you in like he’s a man parched. He reminds you of those flowers, you think as he blinks slowly awake with the dawn, those flowers that open to each morning, unfurling and baring itself as the day begins and greets it. So beautiful in their perseverance, their determination, their beauty.

You watch him unfurl, shuffling back and forth to lean away and press his lips once more to your forehead, slow and clumsy. Then to the bridge of your nose, a little more awake, eyelashes a butterfly’s touch ghosting your face. Then to your lips, halfheartedly awake against the light that paints across his face in vertical stripes of gold and hot, molten bronze. You bump noses and his laugh is sandpaper rough, rumbling thickly through his torso and body more than it is escaping into his voice, and you hold him closer to capture each echoing chuckle in his chest.

He remarks quietly, clearing his throat against your neck, that he’s got a song stuck in his head. You choke on a laugh yourself and ask him how he got an ear-worm within the first few minutes of being awake.

He chuckles again and smiles as he catches your eyes again. My heart is always singing when you’re around, babe, he says, smile widening into something toothier and cheesier as a full-bodied laugh explodes from you in surprise. Cheeky little thing, you think, must be all those TV movies last night.  

You smile at him, giggles still bubbling pleasantly in your throat when he presses his forehead to yours, grins something raw and smaller, softer, lets your noses bump again. He studies you intently and you shake your head minutely.

Stop it, you sigh into him. It won’t be long.

No, it’ll be  _too_  long, he retorts, fierce. He softens again, though, this time more sorrowfully. It’s always long without you there, he says. There’s a void.

Keep my seat warm while I’m gone, you say simply. I won’t be long. Not much longer now, at least.

His face twists, a flash of teeth. _Always._  You won’t even need me. You bring the heat on your own. It’s almost boring without you kicking those slackers to their feet. I just… miss you.

I’m a phone call away, sweetheart, you remind, tracing patterns into his hip where the bottom of his shirt had ridden up.  

I know, but…

You know where this is going.  _I’ll_  go make breakfast while  _you_  shower, yeah?

Finn, he speaks, clinging to you almost desperately as you move to escape the cover of the blanket. You pause at the tone and he stares up at you reverently, taking your wrist in a limp hold.

What if something happens?

You search his face for his thoughts, but as usual you are no mind reader and he only has a poker face when he doesn’t need it. You shift his hand from your wrist to your own, pressing a kiss into his knuckles, then his palm, the same to the other hand as he moves it to cup your face. You press one to his fluttering pulse, the crook of his elbow, to his shoulder, his chin and then slowly, carefully to his lips. His breath stutters as you catch his eyes again. You smile, and it puffs again against your skin as you lean away.

You worry so much. Leave the worrying to me. The only thing that’ll happen for now is your path to a title, unless you’re going to settle beef with Trips, yeah?

He blushes but nods. What about you?

I’ll continue getting better, and I’ll meet you there. You smile and break the atmosphere with dotted constellations, marked by fluttering kiss over his face mockingly as he rears away in feigned annoyance.

Get up, get going! You declare, rolling out of bed while he’s distracted, scurrying out of the room faster than his swiping grasp can catch you, calling over your shoulder as you scamper to the kitchen. The faster you get it over with, the fast you get to come home!

Home… he echoes down the hall in wonderment, and then there’s the sound of bare feet on wood as he jogs quickly into the bathroom, throwing the shower on almost immediately. You choke a few minutes later, food almost burning when you hear him trip and knock everything and the bathroom sink off the damn shelf in there. You hear him curse your name, and you can only find enough in you to flip the eggs and cackle louder.

He has to eat fast, obviously struggling to savor it past his eye firmly watching the clock, and it feels like it’s only ten minutes between waking up and seeing him off as he pulls his suitcase behind him sulkily, checking for keys, phone, wallet in his pockets as he goes.

 _Don’t leave,_  something in you crows.  _Don’t leave, stay with me, stay with me, please. Stay, stay, stay,_  but you know better than he does that he can’t simply  _not go_. Especially with his momentum towards ‘Mania. You can’t go with him, can’t watch his back without location and time differences, can’t keep him safe like you want, can’t do anything. For now. So, for now you’ll keep an eye out, hold down the fort, plan and recover and plan some more. You can wish and long for him all you’d like, wallow it in. Soon, soon you’ll be back in the saddle. But for now, all you can do is wish him well.

 **“Have a good day at work,”**  you say, pressing every hope and worry you have into a kiss at the corner of his mouth, smiling because this is the great Seth Rollins, and he’s never needed well-wishes and luck to raise hell.

Seth stares back at you with an unreadable look that crumbles into a loud, full bodied cackle when you lean away. His eyes crinkle happily as he accepts another kiss that becomes two and then four before finally, hesitantly pulling away. You pass him a carry-on duffle bag a little larger than it was when he’d packed it the night before, now laden with your surprise gift. He grins at you, eyes twinkling, an eyebrow raised.  

“Sure thing, babe. You too. Call me later?”

“As soon as you get off,” you promise, “I’ll talk your ear off all the way t’ your match, if you can handle that much of me.”

Seth crows, smiling that toothy grin and bright eyed, wrapping you up in those ever-warm, ever-familiar arms once more. “Oh, I can handle you. Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing, sweetheart.”

 _I’m the one that worries,_  you don’t say as he slips away from you. You let your arms slide against one another, your fingers brushing from his shoulder to his arm, to his elbow and forearm, fingers ghosting past one another as he leaves to his car, taking everything with him.

 

Your demons relinquish you for by a handful of hours as you enter your home again, finally passing out on the couch. It’s never enough to catch up but enough to keep you running, the few hours of rest. The only lapse in the misery that hangs around your neck like a string noose is the angry vibration and heavy metal of Seth’s ringtone from your phone, bringing it’s warmth and sunflower light back into your chest as it fills the house with its familiar, obnoxious volume.


End file.
